Buying art online when you cannot see it first

Start with the uncomfortable part. On a print, our sales are final. A print is made for your order, so there is no shelf to put it back on, and we replace prints that arrive damaged or defective rather than prints that turned out smaller than you pictured.

Most shops selling art this way work like that. It means the deciding happens before you pay, which is a worse deal than a shoe shop and a much better one than it sounds, because almost all of the risk is in one thing and that thing is measurable.

Size is where people get it wrong

Nearly every regret is a size regret, and it is always the same direction. The print arrives smaller than the picture in your head.

Screens are the reason. A work fills your laptop at forty centimetres from your face. The same work on a wall is seen from three metres, and a wall is much bigger than a laptop.

So do not judge it on the screen. Cut a rectangle of newspaper to the exact size, tape it on the wall, and leave it there for two days. Walk past it. That is the only test that has ever worked for me, and it takes ten minutes.

Two numbers help while you are cutting. Above a sofa or a sideboard, a picture or a group looks right at about two thirds the width of the furniture. And the centre of the picture goes at 145 to 150 centimetres from the floor, which is average eye height and what galleries use.

If the paper rectangle looks too big on the wall, it is the right size. They always do.

Colour will not match your screen, and that is fine

Your monitor makes colour with light and the print makes it with pigment sitting on paper, so they cannot be identical and nobody has solved that.

What to expect in practice: a matte cotton paper reads a little softer and a little deeper than a backlit screen. Blacks are rich rather than glowing. Bright saturated areas, especially strong blues and greens, calm down slightly.

What should not happen is a different colour arriving. If the work is warm on screen it will be warm on paper.

If precision matters to you, look at the work on your phone and your laptop and note how much they already disagree with each other. The print will sit somewhere in that range.

Know what you are actually buying

Three words do the work here, and they are worth a minute.

An **open edition** is printed for as long as people want it. Nothing wrong with that, it just will not be rare.

A **limited edition** stops at a fixed number, and the number should be stated before you buy, not after. Ours get smaller as the format gets bigger: 250 at the smallest size and 50 at the largest, which is worth knowing while you choose a size.

An **original** is the object the artist made, and there is one. If that is what you want, a print is not a smaller version of it, it is a different thing. We wrote about the difference.

Every print of ours comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, which is the piece of paper that makes the edition mean something later.

What actually arrives

Unframed prints come rolled in a hard tube, with a protective sheet over the printed area and tissue padding the ends, or flat depending on size. Framed works come bedded in bubble wrap in a box.

That is worth picturing before you order, because a rolled print needs a day flat under some books before it goes near a frame, and because a framed one is the heavier, more expensive parcel to ship.

If something arrives damaged, photograph it before unwrapping it any further. That photograph is what makes a replacement simple instead of a discussion.

The one thing I would tell a friend

Buy the one you keep coming back to, not the one that matches the sofa.

Sofas get replaced sooner than you think, and the work you chose for the cushions goes with it. The one you kept opening the tab for is still interesting in year four, which is the only durability test that matters.

The prints are here, and the originals here if you want the actual object instead.